InstallMinGW

Windows Installation Guide with MinGW

This page has not changed since 2014. It might be out of date. Please consider Windows Install with MSYS2 instead.

HINT: In this tutorial, we use a base directory for all the tools we install: c:\ow_workspace. We also use several version numbers for dependent libraries in the text below. You will need to change them accordingly.

Preparing your Build Environment

In this section, we prepare your build environment by installing the needed compilation tools. The steps in this section only need to be done once. Now, what is needed to compile OpenWalnut? We use the MinGW GNU compiler collection in an MSYS environment.

Download and execute the latest mingw-get-setup.exe version from SourceForge.
- Choose c:\ow_workspace\MinGW as installation path (If the folders does not exist, you have to create them.). Leave the other options untouched and click the Continue-button.
- Press the continue Button again after the MinGW-Setup is finished. Now you can select the components to be installed. Install the following packages by navigating through the folder structure on the left side:
  - mingw32-gcc (GNU C Compiler)
  - mingw32-gcc-g++ (GNU C++ Compiler)
  - msys-base (Basic MSYS Installation)
- To apply the changes: Select "Installation/Apply Changes" from the menubar and then click the Apply-Button.

Thats it. But we are not yet done. Several libraries and OpenWalnut itself uses CMake as Makefile generation tool. We need to install this tool and tell MSYS where to find it.

Download CMake and install it with the following options:
- The CMake installer asks you whether to add the CMake path to your PATH variable. You will not need it. But it will not be a problem if you choose to add it.
- Choose c:\ow_workspace\CMake as installation path.
Add the CMake executable to your PATH inside the MSYS environment.
- Open the file c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\profile in a text editor
- Add the line export PATH="/c/ow_workspace/CMake/bin:$PATH"
Add the line "c:\ow_workspace\MinGW /mingw" to the file c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\fstab
- Most probably the fstab file does not exist. When you create it, make sure it has no extension like ".txt".
- There should be a new line at the end of the file.

Create a link on your desktop (or startmenu) to the file C:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat and name it "MinGW Shell".

If everything went well, you will be able to open a MinGW Shell and start cmake, g++, gcc and others directly. Ensure that this works properly now. If not, try uninstalling everything and re-run the procedure and double-check that you do all the steps properly.

Preparing Dependencies

We can now start setting up the libraries on which OpenWalnut depends. Be warned: this is a quite time-consuming step but needs to be done only once. For simplicity, we begin with everything which does not need manual compilation:

Download and install the Qt SDK
- Choose c:\ow_workspace\QtSDK as installation directory
- Select Custom as installation type
- Select the components you want. We definitely need:
  - Development Tools->Desktop-Qt->Qt 4.8.0->Desktop Qt Development Libraries for MinGW
  - Everything else is optional and NOT needed for OpenWalnut.
- Tell our Build environment where to find Qt in c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\profile
  - Add the line export QTDIR="/c/ow_workspace/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.0/mingw"
  - Add the path to the DLL files to your PATH environment variable by adding export PATH="$QTDIR/bin:$PATH"
Download and install libz version 1.2.3 for mingw32 (libz-1.2.3-1-mingw32-dev.tar.gz and libz-1.2.3-1-mingw32-dll-1.tar.gz)
- These files are listed under MinGW/Extension/zlib
- Extract to c:\Program Files (x86)\zlib
  - NOTE: unfortunately, the CMake search scripts for zlib do not allow a environment variable pointing to the zlib location. So we are forced to install the files to the location CMake is aware of.
- Add the path to the DLL files to your PATH environment variable by adding export PATH="/c/Program Files (x86)/zlib/bin:$PATH"
Download and extract Eigen3
- Extract to c:\ow_workpsace
  - Please rename the created folder with a weird name like eigen-eigen-ffa8ffb5570 or something similar to eigen3.
- Tell our Build environment where to find it in c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\profile
  - Add the line export EIGEN3_INCLUDE_DIR="/c/ow_workspace/eigen3"

Thats it. To summarize: we had to download Qt, ZLib, and Eigen3 and install them. We have added the corresponding paths to your profile. This, later on, allows CMake to find these libraries. Now, lets continue with boost and OpenSceneGraph.

Download and build the newest OpenSceneGraph.
- Extract the files to c:\ow_workspace
- Open a MinGW Shell.
- Type cd /c/ow_workspace/OpenSceneGraph-3.0.1
- Use CMake to generate the Makefile
  - Type cmake-gui .
    - IMPORTANT: do not use a separate build directory. Build in-source or cmake will later not find the headers properly.
  - Press the Configure button
  - Select MSYS Makefile as makefile generator
    - Ignore the missing PNG lib warning
  - Set the value of CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to "Release"
  - Press the Configure button again
  - Press the Generate button
  - Exit
- As you now have a Makefile, compile OpenSceneGraph:
  - Type make
  - HINT: if you have a multi core machine, you can tell make to use N jobs in parallel by using make -jN
- Tell our build environment where to find it in c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\profile
  - Add the line export OSG_ROOT="/c/ow_workpsace/OpenSceneGraph-3.0.1"
  - Add the path to the DLL files to your PATH environment variable by adding export PATH="$OSG_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
Download and build Boost, version 1.40.0 or higher
- Extract to c:\ow_workspace
- Change to this directory in you MinGW Shell: cd /c/ow_workspace/boost_1_48_0
- Type ./bootstrap.sh --with-toolset=mingw to initially generate the boost build system
- Delete project-config.jam
- Build and boost via ./bjam --prefix=/c/ow_workspace/boost_build --layout=system toolset=gcc link=shared variant=release threading=multi install
- Move the libraries to the correct place: mv /c/ow_workspace/boost_build/lib/libboost*.dll /c/ow_workspace/boost_build/bin
- Tell our build environment where to find it in c:\ow_workspace\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\profile
  - Add the line export BOOST_ROOT="/c/ow_workspace/boost_build"
  - Add the path to the DLL files to your PATH environment variable by adding export PATH="$BOOST_ROOT/lib:$PATH"

Congratulations. If everything went well, you are now able to build OpenWalnut! You think it is too complicated? You probably should have a look at Linux. There, it is only a matter of a handful of keystrokes and you have OpenWalnut up and running.

Build OpenWalnut

First, we need to get the source code! You can download a corresponding source archive or get the latest source via Mercurial. Check Getting_OpenWalnut for all the links. On Windows, TortoiseHG allows you to check out our up-to-date code from our repository. In this tutorial, we assume you have downloaded the code somehow.

Get OpenWalnut code
- Put/Extract it into c:\ow_workspace\OpenWalnut
Build OpenWalnut
- Open a MinGW Shell
- Change to the OpenWalnut Build directory with cd /c/ow_workspace/OpenWalnut/build
- run cmake.exe ../src
  - Press Configure button
  - Select MSYS Makefile generator
  - Press Generate Button
  - Exit
- run make
  - You can, again, add a number of parallel jobs via the -jN parameter
- run OpenWalnut with bin/openwalnut

That is it. If cmake prints an error due to missing libraries and similar, double-check that you properly followed the above steps.

Re-distribute the OpenWalnut binary

As we have added each DLL path to the $PATH environment variable, Windows' dynamic linker finds all the required DLLs properly. If you want to re-distribute a binary OpenWalnut package, you need to collect the required DLL files and OpenWalnut into one directory. This section shows how this can be done easily.

Remember: The file names and paths might change in future versions of MinGW or the third party libs. Please adapt it accordingly.

Copy OpenWalnut to the package directory
- In a MinGW Shell, change to your OpenWalnut build directory: cd /c/ow_workspace/OpenWalnut-1.2.5/build
- Start CMake with cmake-gui.exe . (the dot is important)
- In CMake, search the property CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
  - Set this to C:/ow_workspace/packaging/
- Configure, Generate and Exit
- Call make install to copy binaries and required resources to the packaging directory.
Copy the basic MinGW runtime files from C:\MinGW\bin@ to C:/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
- libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
- libstdc++-6.dll
- mingwm10.dll
Copy the zlib DLL from /c/Program Files (x86)/zlib to /c/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
Copy the following Qt DLLs from /c/ow_workspace/QtSDK/Desktop/Qt/4.8.0/mingw to /c/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
- QtCore4.dll
- QtGui4.dll
- QtOpenGL4.dll
- QtWebKit4.dll
- QtNetwork4.dll
Copy all OSG DLLs from /c/ow_workspace/OpenSceneGraph-3.0.1/bin to C:/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
- Use cp /c/ow_workspace/OpenSceneGraph-3.0.1/bin/*.dll /c/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
- Also copy OSG Plugins, use cp -r /c/ow_workspace/OpenSceneGraph-3.0.1/bin/osgPlugins-3.0.1 /c/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
Copy all Boost DLLs from /c/ow_workspace/boost_build/lib to C:/ow_workspace/packaging/bin
- Use cp /c/ow_workspace/boost_build/lib/*.dll /c/ow_workspace/packaging/bin

NOTE: Although OpenWalnut itself does not need all boost and OSG libraries directly, some modules might! So we copy all the DLLs to ensure everything works directly.

Thats it. You can now compress this into an archive and redistribute it on multiple Windows PCs without the need of a running MinGW installation.